Through the years, the Times’ Jewish journalists have continued
to oppose “Jewish interests” so as not to draw attention to their affiliation
with the group. They downplayed the
persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Europe and relegated the Holocaust to
its back pages, opposed the creation of Israel
as a haven for the Holocaust’s survivors, condemned Israel
for the use of force in defending itself in successive wars and intifadas, and
sided with black racists in their anti-Semitic pogroms in Harlem
and Brooklyn.
Their harshest criticisms are reserved for the Hasidim, the black-coated
and black-hatted Orthodox with the strange mannerisms
and old world customs that might be considered quaint when displayed by the
Amish, but constitute an embarrassment to these modern, Westernized and
cultured Jews when practiced by their co-religionists.
That these Jewish journalists’
attempts at disassociation, by opposing the interests of their co-religionists,
could have contributed to bringing catastrophe to their brethren seems not to
have impressed these journalists with their own inhumanity, although they
liberally proclaim the alleged inhumanity of those beleaguered brethren. Had the past policies of the Times prevailed, the half-million
survivors of the Holocaust or their descendants would have rotted in the
Displaced Persons camps instead of finding refuge in Israel, and the Jews in
Israel would either be a persecuted and oppressed minority in an Arab-Muslim
Palestinian state or slaughtered by conquering Arab armies or intifadists.
These Jewish-American journalists
are a world apart, however, and in more than just geography, from the Israeli
writers, adherents of the Peace Now movement, whose bitter diatribes against
their country are also frequently published in these papers, in the Op-Ed
sections. These Israelis are not
unconscious anti-Semites as are their Jewish cohorts in the American press and
are not at all embarrassed by their Jewish heritage. Their pro-Arab, anti-Israel orientation has
evolved out of their political and philosophical indoctrination in the
labor-Zionist movements that were responsible for the large-scale Jewish
immigration to Palestine in the
1920’s and 1930’s and the back-breaking development of agriculture and industry
in the previously barren and unproductive land.
They are the progeny of the socialist pioneers who worked the land in
the communal and cooperative settlements (moshavim and kibutzim), and developed industry
from scratch, under the control of the giant, socialist-oriented union, Histadrut, singing songs about how Jews and Arabs working
together in the fields of Palestine will bring the two peoples closer, in
brotherhood.
Even after repeated Arab attacks
and massacres during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the close identification of the
Palestinian Arabs’ leader Haj Amin
el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, before and
during World War II, with the Nazi regime and its plans for a Final Solution,
and the repeated attempts by the Arabs to destroy Israel and annihilate its
Jews, these Jewish socialists continue to maintain their optimistic view of
Arab nature in accordance with their political doctrine. Despite all the evidence to the contrary,
they blame their own government for the absence of peace.
They are the ideological cousins
of the Jewish-American communists of the 1920’s-1950’s, who embraced communism
in reaction to the oppression and anti-Semitism of their former East European
neighbors and czars in the old country and to their later sweatshop existence
in the dilapidated old tenements of New York’s lower East Side in their hostile
and depression-ridden new country. Those
Jews never gave up their faith in the Communist International and its Russian
leadership despite clear evidence of Stalin’s massacre of millions of peasants,
the totalitarian nature of his regime, and his purges and executions of Jewish
intellectuals, in 1936-39 and then again before his death, in 1949-53. Like these American cousins, the Peace Now
Israelis have transformed themselves from idealists to ideologues and cling to
a philosophy that has long been discredited by observable and incontrovertible
facts.
It is hard to fault a Gandhi-like
philosophy that seeks peace based on tolerance and mutual acceptance. And most Israelis, even among the small
minority who believe that they have a right to all of Palestine
because of biblical entitlement, would be willing to relinquish the West
Bank and Gaza Strip for a secure peace. But the time is long past when a rational and
knowledgeable person, much less an Israeli confronted daily by the conflict,
can believe that the Palestinians are willing to make peace on the basis of
anything less than the destruction of Israel and that it is the fault of
successive Israeli governments that peace is not at hand. Fortunately, this fifth column of Peace Now
ideologues is a shrinking presence among the Israelis, even though that would
be hard to discern from the prominence given them on the Op-Ed pages of the NY Times and Washington Post.
And who are these Palestinians,
the darlings of the press and the Europeans?
Are they beleaguered freedom fighters like the Czechs and English
resisting their Nazi attackers -- great democrats and humanitarians -- that we
read about in the European press and hear from their diplomats?